"Miss Joan, I am afraid I vexed you just now," he said, with grave humility. "Will you believe it unintentional--stupid, on my part, and grant me your pardon?"
"Oh, dear!" she cried gayly. "We are not used to this here. It is quite King Cophetua and the beggar maid." She dropped him a mock courtesy, and held out her hand in token of amity, when the full signification of what she had said rushed into her mind and flooded her face with crimson. Without another word or look she fled upstairs, and he heard her door bang behind her.
Mr. Charles Maitland, after this _rencontre_, went down smiling grimly. In the hall he stood for a moment in deep thought; then sagely shook his head several times at a stuffed fox and joined the party in the drawing room.
[Illustration: MR. CHARLES MAITLAND, AFTER THIS RENCONTRE, WENT DOWN SMILING GRIMLY.]
The next day and the next passed with surprising quickness, as the latter days of a visit always do. In another forty-eight hours Maitland's would be over. Yet singularly enough his spirits did not rise, as he expected they would, at the near prospect of release. As he closed his bedroom door he had a vision of a pair of gray eyes smiling into his, and his palm seemed still to tingle with the touch of a soft, warm hand. He had kept his resolution well--small credit to him. Joan had seemed to avoid him since her unlucky speech upon the stairs; when she did speak to him her words, or more often her tone, stung him, and he smarted under a sense that she repaid with interest the small account in which he was inclined to hold the family generally. He resented her veiled contempt with strange bitterness, so that Agnes remarked with her usual candor that he and Joan never spoke to one another save to "jangle." Afterward, walking on the lawn, some line about "sweet bells jangled out of tune," ran in his head. The girl was a vixen, he said to himself, yet he tried to imagine how tender and glorious the great gray eyes, that he only knew as cold or saucy or defiant, could be when their depths were stirred by love. But his imagination failing to satisfy even himself, he went to put on his beagling dress in the worst of humors.
Possibly this made him a trifle reckless, for a promising run ended in ten minutes so far as he was concerned, in a sprained ankle. In jumping over a low fence into a lane his one foot came down sideways on a large stone upon which some pauper had scamped his work, and the mischief was done. The ominous little circle that hunting men know so well soon gathered round him, and he was helped to his feet, or rather foot. Then Agnes fetched the carriage, and he was driven back to Blore. Now, under the circumstances, what could Mrs. Quaritch, without an _arrière pensée_ in the world, do but press him to stay until at least he could put the foot to the ground? Nothing. And what could he do but consent? At any rate, that is what he did.